Dakota, 9

STOCKTON - Half a peeled orange, a snack from 16 hours earlier, rested on the floor. An empty cup of chocolate pudding sat upside down on a shelf looking like it had been there awhile.

Roger Phillips

STOCKTON - Half a peeled orange, a snack from 16 hours earlier, rested on the floor. An empty cup of chocolate pudding sat upside down on a shelf looking like it had been there awhile.

The wallpaper in the bedroom was torn. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. A pair of old toilets stood out in the backyard, filled with dirt, accompanied by an old washer and an old dryer.

Roosevelt Elementary third-grader Dakota Christian, 9, arrived home.

It was early in the school year and his stepfather, recently released from jail, listened to music that included lyrics unprintable in a family newspaper. "You're grounded," he told Dakota. "You didn't do your homework last night."

Awhile later, Dakota's mother, Joelene, walked through the front door. When she saw a couple of visitors in the living room, she said loudly, "This house is a filthy freakin' mess. ... Sorry."

In the coming weeks, the disorder in the house was the least of the family's issues. By late September, there had been a series of events that Dakota matter-of-factly recounted.

He said his stepfather had been sent back to jail for eight months because he'd arrived for a meeting with his parole officer "carrying a buck knife." Dakota said his biological father would soon be released from jail.

His grandmother, he said, had moved in because her house had burned down.

And after someone tried to break in, Dakota said his mother had used extension cords to electrify the fence in front of the house. When she was rigging it up, Dakota said Joelene tested the fence by tossing a bag of popcorn at it.

"The bag caught on fire," Dakota recalled, laughing.

The house is a menagerie with snakes, dogs, chickens and rabbits among the residents. Dakota sleeps in the upper bunk in a bedroom he shares with his older brother Aaron, an 11-year-old Roosevelt fifth-grader. Aaron was suspended four times in the opening months of school after altercations.

In mid-September, Dakota's class was reading a book about the birth of an early California town. Kinsman asked her students why the townspeople had moved west. Dakota raised his right hand, stretched it high, reaching to the point where you feared his shoulder might pop out of its socket. Kinsman called on him.

"They came west because of the gold rush," Dakota said. "Because people were finding gold out west."

Several classmates clapped. Asked later why he thought he had been applauded, Dakota said, "Because I tried my best and I thought it out. So I knew what the answer was because I used my head."

Kinsman said Dakota's friends applauded him because they have seen how hard he has been trying lately.

"No one really claps for me," Dakota said, nodding when asked if he appreciated the recognition. "But I got the answer right and everybody started clapping. That's the first time anybody really clapped for me."